Baby-killer Dina Rodrigues and her four co-accused were on Friday granted permission to appeal against their sentences.
Cape High Court Judge Basheer Waglay, however, rejected applications by Rodrigues and three of the men to appeal against their convictions.
They were sentenced last month for the 2005 murder of baby Jordan-Leigh Norton, the child by another woman of Rodrigues’s lover, Neil Wilson.
Their appeal, to be heard by a full bench of the high court, could take as long as a year to come to court.
Rodrigues and two of the men she hired to carry out the killing, Sipho Mfazwe and Mongezi Bobotyane, were given life sentences for the murder.
Mfazwe and Bobotyane were also given 10-year sentences for aggravated armed robbery carried out at the Norton family home in Cape Town at the same time as the killing.
Zanethemba Gwada, the only one of the five who did not appeal against the conviction, and Bonginkosi Sigenu were jailed for an effective 15 years each for their part in the murder and robbery.
Waglay rejected argument by Rodrigues’s advocate, John van der Berg, that he should not have relied on Wilson’s evidence in drawing the conclusions he did.
Van der Berg submitted that Wilson had given several different versions of a crucial phone call in which Rodrigues informed him the child was dead and that she had paid R10 000 to ”make it go away”.
This could have referred to a plan to kidnap the child, which had then gone awry.
Van der Berg also said the trial had been ”overheated”, and that it had taken place in an ”extraordinary atmosphere”.
Waglay said, however, that Wilson’s testimony added to and supported a larger body of evidence, and that as a whole that evidence pointed to the inescapable conclusion that Rodrigues was guilty.
Waglay also rejected an application by Sigenu’s advocate, Caryl Verrier, for two ”special entries”, or acknowledgements of irregularities in the trial, that would entitle Sigenu to appeal.
Verrier argued that the television broadcast of the judgement was an invasion of Sigenu’s rights to dignity and had turned the court into a circus.
She also said the advocate who initially represented Sigenu, Charles Simon, had ignored Sigenu’s instructions and undermined his defence in a number of ways.
However, Waglay said that in the final analysis, Sigenu had been able to present to the court what he wanted to, and had in fact ”played along with Simon”.
He said the application for the special entries was made after the deadline set by the Criminal Procedure Act — which Verrier strongly disputed — was not made in good faith and that granting it would be an abuse of the court process. — Sapa
‘Like vultures’
Meanwhile, Sigenu told the court on Friday that the media behaved like vultures during the trial.
He made the claims in an affidavit submitted as part of his unsuccessful special-entry application.
He said that while there had been a media presence throughout the lengthy trial, it became a ”big problem” for him when television cameras and photographers were admitted during judgement and sentence.
”Immediately before the judge entered the courtroom and again immediately after he left, there could have been 10 photographers from the press who had cameras with flashes, who almost jumped over the advocates’ benches to get closer to my accused’s box in order to take photos of us,” Sigenu said.
”I expected my trial to be conducted throughout with due decorum and in an atmosphere which allowed the court to make its decision in an unemotional manner.
”But during the court’s judgements on conviction and sentence, there were no such things.”
Verrier approached Waglay in chambers mid-way through his marathon judgement to query his decision to allow cameras, ”but the judge shouted at her and told her ‘you don’t come and tell me what to do in my court!’.”
”It looked like the judge was working together with the media to get more exposure for my case,” claimed Sigenu, who is the youngest of the five accused.
”Having television cameras and lots of cameramen from the press in court turned the court into a circus.
”It was humiliating for me to have lots of cameramen swooping in on my accused’s box like vultures swooping in on a kill. It was like this even before I was convicted.
”Even before I was convicted, I felt like the media and the public had found me guilty. My right to be presumed innocent was just words.” — Sapa